by
Carol Ko, Staff Writer | August 22, 2013
From the August 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Randy Walker, vice president of CT and MR at BC Technical: It’s a whole lot easier for vendors or suppliers to go into the materials manager or biomed shop or the radiology department. It wasn’t extremely difficult to get into. Now, with CFOs signing the agreement, it’s a lot harder to get into those relationships. [As an independent service organization] we don’t have GE or Siemens or Toshiba tattooed on our chests where literally those companies can go into offices and talk about technologies we can’t because they make light bulbs, televisions, a million other things. They can talk about a whole variety of things and bring hospitals savings in 40 areas. We can provide higher quality service at lower cost in a couple of areas. It’s all about trust —the challenge of developing those relationships. For anyone to sign off money on anything, it’s a trust issue, to know that you can get the services you say you’re going to provide.
Will it be better in the long-term? There are people who are willing to walk into the office and say – we’ll give you the million cost savings right now. But if we can educate CEOs on the level of expertise and service, it requires us to educate them on a higher level. It takes a little more time. The interesting thing is, if we can get one win at a regional hospital, in one county, a lot of these guys know each other and they’ll call each other and then getting in there is a lot easier the next county over.
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Larry Sheppard
Choosing A Service Provider
August 13, 2013 03:27
My department is involved in all service agreement selection prior to the PO being cut to the vendor by Materials Management. There are a lot of variables today that have to be taken into consideration prior to selection of a vendor to assure the right coverage for the right equipment. Capital equipment purchases are tightening up so one has to get the most from the acquisition.
*Software upgrades are becoming unaffordable without a service agreement and most ISOs can't provide them. *Categorizing your equipment by risk is important. Since in most cases MRI is not a trauma device, you may save money by not taking extended coverage hours.
* Pooling glassware spreads the risk and reduces cost on CT coverage.
*In house service provides some great contributions to savings with several modalities, but in others it can be a cash cow to maintain.
*Standardizing your equipment inventory adds benefit to your negotiating and in-house training strengths.
With the changes that are taking place in healthcare today, service will increase in the percentage of contribution of OEM revenues and I believe they will utilize their negotiating ability to eliminate third party or ISO.
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